I love sid! It's not for everyone but this is what life is all about for me.

I experienced everything mentioned above. So I opened the experimental repository and lo nothing was going to be removed. So I did a du with the experimental repo and it seems to have gone OK. A bit flakey when I booted this morning (black screen and just the cursor) but init 3 - init 5 solved that.

dist-upgrading against experimental is an absolute nono and a very stupid idea please do not do it!

greetz
devil

clubex

Post subject:Posted: 10.03.2011, 13:15

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 100

Status: Offline

devil: I am a free man. I do what I want to do and I know and accept the consequences.

EDIT: Oh and by the way it's not "stupid" it's "inadvisable". The former can be taken as an insult.

redsid

Post subject:Posted: 10.03.2011, 14:23

Joined: 2011-02-08
Posts: 32
Location: Lake Otsego
Status: Offline

Now, now, children! You are both correct. But devil has to protect those that would accept poor advice. Clubex, you should know how 'excitable' the Aptosid team is! Both my 32 & 64, as of now, still wish to destroy QT4. We must be patient! Try to remember, if you never did another update, you would still have a working system.

devil

Post subject:Posted: 10.03.2011, 21:49

Joined: 2010-08-26
Posts: 491
Location: Berlin
Status: Offline

i am tempted to move this to dragons section, given that this thread has info that can break your system.
but as others might miss it then, i will leave it in here.
please: just wait until kde is installable again (if you lost it) or refrain from upgrading until its not removed anymore.
dist-upgrading against experimental puts your system in an unsupportable state for us (and anyone else). anyone who knows what they are doing would not go down that road. its just totaly unpredictable.

and to clubex: will you sit in IRC and mend all the broken systems from users following your way? i guess, it'll rather be us. so please, do what you like, but keep it to yourself. thxx

greetz
devil

clubex

Post subject:Posted: 11.03.2011, 09:57

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 100

Status: Offline

devil and others: You're right. On reflection I should have posted in the dragons section of the forum. I just tend to forget it's there, that it's for we more adventurous (but not foolhardy) types. It's a feeble excuse but it's the truth.

If you lack the knowledge to resolve a problem then always wait for the dev's advice.

DeepDayze

Post subject:Posted: 11.03.2011, 14:57

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 616
Location: USA
Status: Offline

Lets all calm down and not attack anyone

As this is the "Dragon's Lair", we should be able to discuss more radical actions to repair breakages that result from ignorance and carelessness so people who have an issue they can't get resolved thru normal means can get help here

DonKult

Post subject:Posted: 11.03.2011, 20:55

Team Member

Joined: 2010-09-02
Posts: 485

Status: Offline

The problem is that for all expect really really strange cases if the answer is "experimental" the question was "how can i easily break my system in a non-obvious way?".

NOBODY cares for experimental. Really nobody. You can find tests in there, like at times newer versions of libraries which are incompatible but not marked as such. APT for examples in its last circle was ~6 months in it breaking the binary compatibility with the last version on nearly all of the 14th uploads. A three months ago there was even a completely different resolver for APT in experimental. And while APT team might encourage testers you will be basically alone in case of failure as your bugreports will be treated somewhere near wishlist (as not effecting released versions) and 'unfixable, please reinstall your system' is a valid solution as uploads to experimental can have 'it at least builds on my system - does it build also on the debian buildservers? Lets try!' quality. Sure, i am talking just about APT here, but it can be and properly is the same for many other packages as experimental is for… yeah… experiments.

I have forgotten the details, but we had users last year who suddenly couldn't connect to the Internet. The offender was a packaged preview-release version of a package in experimental who carried a timebomb for four months as with an update of another package it was instantly broken. The official packages were fixed long before, but as nobody cared for experimental that one was untouched…

So, whatever you do, you need to know what you do. And seriously, if you haven't the time to read what APT tells you before pressing 'Y' i am not to confident that you will have enough knowledge…

(for the non-natives - like me - and to make that crystal clear: you is an indefinite pronoun here, so i don't mean you or you or even you, but an undefined anyone - in german i would use 'man' instead of you… - so this is a general information/warning post and not a direct (or indirect) criticism or attack)

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor

agaida

Post subject:Posted: 11.03.2011, 22:00

Joined: 2011-01-16
Posts: 22
Location: Bielefeld
Status: Offline

I have no problems with experimental - i love it. But following DonKult, you must have fun in breaking systems. In that case experimental is fine. And i prefer installations from experimental in a sandbox for the first time, second time in a new sandbox builded from my running system - and if this is working, eventually selected packages from experimental went to my working environment. Sounds like a lot of work, but it isnt. A copy of a running system (typ. 15 G) is done in approx. 5 minutes. And yes - a backup can be a nice thing.

DeepDayze

Post subject:Posted: 12.03.2011, 00:44

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 616
Location: USA
Status: Offline

I keep a test partition cloned from my main system handy as well as I like to break things too

If a package from experimental works in my "test" environment and doesn't break anything else then why not? Of course if an experimental package does make a mess I can then no big loss as I can restore my test environment. Some people might even prefer running a test environment in virtualbox even...so if you do keep backups then you can play in the sandbox to your hearts content

Sometimes it could be a good idea to file a bug report against an experimental package...it could help the developers get feedback at least on for just to say for example a new way of resolving dependencies like what DonKult mention.

DonKult

Post subject:Posted: 12.03.2011, 11:40

Team Member

Joined: 2010-09-02
Posts: 485

Status: Offline

DeepDayze wrote:

If a package from experimental works in my "test" environment and doesn't break anything else then why not?

DonKult wrote:

I have forgotten the details, but we had users last year who suddenly couldn't connect to the Internet. The offender was a packaged preview-release version of a package in experimental who carried a timebomb for four months as with an update of another package it was instantly broken. The official packages were fixed long before, but as nobody cared for experimental that one was untouched…

The experimental package worked a few months just fine. It "just" exploded after the installation of an other package (from unstable) months after the timebomb was installed. The amount of people remembering that they had installed this timebomb from experimental is rather small. Especially as it was a dependency of another package, not explicitly requested itself…

You can install certain stuff from experimental - in freezes the amount raises - but this highly depends on the software, the maintainer and its version. Just because iceweasel 4.0 betas are packaged nicely there doesn't mean that iceweasel 5.0 betas will be.

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor